Judge: Music website violated Beatles copyrights

LOS ANGELES 
A website that sold songs by The Beatles for 25 cents more than a year before legal digital copies were available is liable for copyright infringement, a federal judge has ruled.

U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton Tucker ruled Wednesday that BlueBeat.com violated the copyrights and presented unfair competition to music company EMI Group and others. The site streamed and sold music by the Fab Four and other top-name acts, including Coldplay and Lily Allen, for several days before music companies sued to shut it down in November 2009.

The ruling did not address how much damages BlueBeat may be liable for, although EMI's attorneys have noted that it began streaming and selling Beatles music shortly after the release of a re-mastered box set of all the group's albums last year.

In court filings, the site acknowledge it had distributed more than 67,000 Beatles songs before another federal judge issued a preliminary injunction that temporarily shut down the site.

With great fanfare, Beatles music became available on Apple's iTunes on Nov. 16, and in the first week more than two million of their songs and 450,000 albums were purchased. The popular music service sells the group's songs for $1.29 apiece.

Tucker rejected arguments by BlueBeat and its owner, Hank Risan, that he had pioneered a method he calls "psycho-acoustic simulation" that resulted in unique versions of copyrighted music. The judge noted that Risan admitted the recordings available on his site were based on copies of CDs that he had purchased.

"Risan's obscure and undefined pseudo-scientific language appears to be a long-winded way of describing 'sampling,' i.e. copying, and fails to provide any concrete evidence of independent creation," Tucker wrote in her ruling.

Phone and e-mail messages for BlueBeat's attorney, Archie Robinson, were not immediately returned.